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I step onto the tarmac at Easter Island’s minuscule airport, holding a copy of The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda. Shortly before his death 40 years ago, the Chilean poet visited Easter Island and wrote this slim volume of bittersweet ruminations on travel and mortality.

As passengers from our plane funnel into the one-story airport terminal, I recall the words I read on the five-hour flight from mainland Chile: “We all arrive by different streets / by unequal languages, at Silence.”

But where is the silence that Neruda promised?

As the aircraft’s engines whir, I follow the excited chatter of the other travelers to the airport’s arrival hall. Easter Island is famous for its unusual and enigmatic stone statues, but the scene at baggage claim is no different from what I’ve seen at many a tawdry tourist destination, with touts trying to outdo one another to lure me to their establishments.

I came all the way here in search of complete solitude, naively fantasizing that every moment on Easter Island would be like poetry.

I’m crushed.

“We get 70,000 visitors coming to this island every year,” says Sergio Rapu Haoa, the amiable owner of my hotel.

That number might sound negligible compared with Hawaii’s 7 million, but Hawaii has almost 1.5 million residents, Rapu notes, while only 6,000 people call Easter Island home. That means the island gets more than 11 visitors per resident every year. To provide for the tourists, Rapu says, Easter Island has to constantly bring in cargo ships full of supplies.

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as it’s known in the native language, has an intriguing heritage that needs to be preserved. It remains a mystery how humans came to set up the world’s most remote settlement, although, according to local lore, a Polynesian chief named Hotu Matu’a — inspired by his priest’s dream of “the navel of the earth” — led his family and crew to this 63-square-mile landmass more than 2,600 miles east of Tahiti.

Of course, as an archaeologist, Rapu has a different take: The superb seafarers of the South Pacific could have easily traversed the Pacific in their wooden outrigger canoes, reaching Rapa Nui around 400 A.D. (although some estimate the date as late as 1200 A.D.). The islanders prospered on the pristine speck of volcanic land, eventually developing a dazzling civilization capable of carving, transporting and erecting the island’s famous moai, stone representations of ancestors entrusted with protecting the living. Until Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen named the island after a Christian holiday in 1722, Rapa Nui remained a secret to the outside world.

I can imagine how human forms sprang from the earth at Rano Raraku, the volcanic slope where almost all the moai were quarried before being transported to their final resting places on every corner of the island. (How they were moved is another mystery: The most prominent theory is that, harnessed by ropes on two sides, the structures were rocked forward to “walk” to their destinations.)

No fewer than 397 moai still lie here in various states of completion, as if all the workers had simply vanished at once.

Made of hardened volcanic ash, many of the gray statues have been largely obscured by centuries of erosion and landslides, with only their heads and stoic faces exposed to the sun. Their sheer size, as tall as 33 feet, is hard to fathom until I walk up close to one and realize that its nose is the size of my whole body.

Although Rano Raraku is one of the most visited sites on the island, all the tour buses have left. The statues obscure the few other visitors. At last, I have exactly what I came to Rapa Nui for: I’m alone with the monoliths and taking in the mystery, the vast solitude.

The islanders eventually stopped revering the moai. During the 18th and 19th centuries, they toppled every one of the almost 1,000 on the island — an undertaking that must have taken as much effort as erecting them. Then, a 1960 tsunami swept up Tongariki’s fallen moai and scattered them about the island and into the surrounding sea.

Now, restored to their upright glory, the 15 moai at Tongariki are a magnificent sight, glowing in pink and golden hues.

I don’t see another person while taking in a violet sunset at Ahu Akivi, which offers the island’s only moai that face the sea, or exploring the 4 miles of chilly underground caves at Ana Te Pahu. Not one sunbather dots Ovahe beach as I descend onto its pink sand. I run into nobody while walking the rim of Rano Kau’s crater for an hour.

Even the road remains mostly empty, save for the herds of wild horses that rule the island.